That horrible old Mr. Clark has gone off to the lavatory well old men are always doing that aren't they hahaha and so I have snuck in here and ohmygod I have never SEEN such a gnarly old Mac but what I really want to say is I have visited your blogs and I think you are really cute but what's this about my not being free, are you making a joke, oh that's so awesome.

Anyway uh-oh gotta go now :)

Love Paris

PS Hey Robb did you check out J-Lo texting at the after party that was so cool!

The glorious Lilli seems to have evidenced a preference for spy flicks, according to IMDB. She appeared as a small player in an early Hitchcock, "Secret Agent". And now I must see it in order to pinpoint her beauty in his serpentine plot.

I believe I have a dvd copy of it, I kid you not, in my top dresser drawer...a dollar-store purchase a few years back. So later, with pleasure, I get to unwrap Lilli.

Now unlock Mr. Clark from the lavatory, Paris. That's not nice. If you persist in this pattern of bad behavior, we're going have to send a secret agent in after you.

Ah, the magic. My favourite Lilli Palmer film is still her Hollywood debut, 1946.

Though the material is entirely grim and somber, Lilli appears at her most darkly glorious, playing an Italian partisan girl opposite OSS agent/nuclear physicist Gary Cooper in Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger. Here she is plainly cast for her beauty not her acting talent, but the gaze of battered doubt she wears throughout this tale of relentless Nazi brutality and elusive atomic secrets seems perhaps to come close to touching her cinematic essence. (Lang made the film for Warners, and the studio forced him to leave on the editing room floor an even darker extension of the story, which has Nazi scientists escaping to Argentina with the secrets of the Bomb... which reminds me that much later Lilli played the wife of the Nazi Hunter, on the trail of Mengele in Paraguay, in The Boys from Brazil.)

Of course Lilli's own background made the Lang casting not too bad a fit for her, she was Jewish, had been born in Posen (later Poznan), the daughter of a surgeon, and had been set on the run by the Nazis. She made 84 films in all, most of them in Europe, was also a painter, wrote several books. She was married for a while to Rex Harrison. Ah, what beautiful people, what aura, what mysteries...

This little anthology of Lilli Palmer moments is quite nice, but it was compiled in 2007 and thus bears the traces of the Cute Generation... in fact, at the end a summary legend appears which left me devastated:

"intelligent, cute, charming... fantastic!"

There is it seems no escaping Cuteness.

A good antidote to Cuteness is the wonderful four-part interview Dick Cavett did with LP in Berlin in the 1970s. Here this extremely sophisticated, worldly and well-spoken actress recalls her flight from the Nazis, her wartime marriage to Harrison, her friendship with Noel Coward, and some interesting career moments -- among other things the fact that her first great crush was on a screen actor, Gary Cooper, resulting from having seen him kiss Marlene Dietrich on the lips in El Morocco.

Great to see all this, including s glimpse even of Cavett -- more than one ever knew of Lilli Palmer (what have I been missing!), and doesn't DC make those doing it these nights look rather pale? Anyway, an offering from 'over here' for you ---

Oh Lilli, Lilli...Lang might have been difficult, but what a scene! And that Cavett interview. Neither miss a beat. What a gift. Thank you for this. I even got to an original rendition of "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." Nice morning in Miami.